a curious euphoria?

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Moments ago, I just prepared some food, then walked in to my bedroom with the food, remembering in my childhood the experience of preferring to eat alone so often. Many times I would go watch TV by myself while eating– as my parents watched another TV set with their dinner plates on TV trays. Our typical dinner “conversation” would be guessing the answers to the TV game show “Wheel of Fortune.”

I remember going to a friend’s house in the 1990s and eating dinner with them- and what a different experience that was- holding hands before the meal, then praying, and always acknowledging the presence of me as a visitor. What an odd thing that it can be so odd to feel welcomed somewhere?!

What can I welcome in to my life (and who)? Are there particular conversations that have been unwelcome (even resisted), and if so, which ones (and/or with whom)?

Today I shared with one person that, around her, I had been avoiding expressing or experiencing anger– even admitting it to myself. I have been acting as if my own anger is not safe- which led to stifling it, then building it up, passively expressing it, and only overtly expressing in “blow-outs” which, in fact, is the precise RECIPE for the more dangerous expressions of anger. Ironic, huh?

I declare that I have attracted to myself (i.e. generated) circumstances and people that produced the experience of anger for me- as

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well as whatever fit with me having a fear of expressing that anger. I also get that it is not really about those people, but the dynamic that I created with certain people, ultimately resulting in a certain experience for me personally. In other words, I used her/them to create something for myself, something attractive to me somehow, something familiar- for if someone is angry at me, that may be what I have been calling “love.”

So, I can magnify anger or not. Knowing that I can do it- and even how I have been- is interesting!

I make no “problem” out of that past. If anger is the form of aliveness that fits to experience and/or express in a given moment- for myself or another- so be it. If some other form, so be it!

I am aliveness. I have always been aliveness.

Let us welcome the energy of anger: the spirit of the guardian, the protector, the defender, and even the vengeful or desperate (and so on). I welcome anger and the most effective expression anger possible- without knowing what that would be.

I remember trying to get other people to be angry at me- to test their concern and their commitment… and to attract their attention. In elementary school, I cut in to the side of a container of glue, setting up my mother for a messy spill. In high school, I did what my father explicitly and reasonably asked me not to do, and caused damage to something of his.

My valuation of my relation with him was such that I -however consciously- took the opportunity to attract his attention as anger- and of course indirectly (“it was an accident” – which it was, but entirely foreseeable, predictable). If doing that (the prohibited thing) was a possible way to get what I valued, that may be what happens when other methods fail. It can thus become a pattern, a standard operating procedure. Make people angry- attract their attention- and dominate the dynamic by having the conversation be all about whatever anger they should not be experiencing towards me (which I covertly produced- so covertly that I might not notice or even deny it).

“See- he doesn’t REALLY love me; after all, look: he threw that at me! There is proof.”

However, if I keep doing that- either with a particular person or with a series of people, then perhaps I do not even really believe my own allegations about what is proved by which. “I am absolutely certain now that he does not love me- but, hey let me try one more thing again, maybe give him just one more second chance again, yeah?”

I wanted attention. I explored various ways to get it (learning from others and of course from my own results as well). I kept the methods that worked for me- sometimes even after they had stopped working.

“God-darned

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Humans!”

I allow myself to be how I am and how I may not be. From “THIS Here,” all of life- not just my own- is allowed to be how it is and how it may not be.

I declare the presence of acceptance, connection, intimacy, and commitment. My commitment to connection (sharing attention) was SO effective I even produced anger as an expression of that commitment. Is there another method that fits in other situations? There could be. Is there a situation in which anger is the fitting expression of commitment? Apparently there may have been!

4 Responses to “a curious euphoria?”

Great post. We have to be aware of anger and its purpose at the moment it starts to emerge. We need to ask what is anger giving us at that moment? Then we can release it consciously, without having to express it.

I think of anger as a sudden reaction to a perceived threat which reflexively produces a verbal and/or physical “approaching” or “locking in on.” It is like grabbing someone’s shirt- not just assertive but domineering (at least in the functional intention).

I may grab someone by the shirt and then attempt to move them out of the way of an approaching car with an intense concentration of force. I might say with a rush of adrenalin and focus: “Get OUT of the way. Get over HERE! Listen, why the hell did you not look for traffic first? You scared the hell out of me just now!”

So, anger as I mean the word is sudden and sharp and spontaneous. As for the kind of pattern you were referencing in your comment, Elle, that might be resentment, like a story that Byron Katie tells herself about the way the past should have been but may not have actually been and then the sense of an ego arises with a statement like “I am so angry about what you did not do last week that you should have done.” If there is an awareness of a lingering “anger” with the identifying of an alleged particular trigger or source, then that may already be resenting with blaming and shaming and so on.

That is much more complex and in many ancient spiritual traditions, there are instructions to focus away from such resenting and instead focus toward one’s own conscious presence (“notice: who is the one who is aware of the resenting and the thinking of the past?”). That may even mean withdrawing from a recurring “trigger” as in “turning away from the disturbing pattern referenced as the evil or trigger” or “turning away from evil.”

So, to go meditate in a quiet place like a church implies to retreat from any stimulus that may be irritating, such as the house where you live and where there are many reminders of your child who died soon after getting run over by a car last week. Further, to be around traffic may even be a trigger for grief and rage.

If I see someone run a red light and last week my child was killed by someone running a red light, I may have quite a strong reaction to seeing someone run a red light. I may be surprised by a sudden surge of adrenalin and animosity toward that driver. If someone even talks about an incident a few years ago when they ran a red light, then a still-grieving parent may get triggered reflexively and criticize them harshly or “grill them” as in interrogate them with a bunch of harsh, accusative questions about why they were so stupid that they would run a red light.

Meditation and spiritual counseling (and things like reiki) give people an opportunity to relax deeply so that the neuro-muscular tensions and biochemical traumas that they may have internalized physically and energetically can be “unlocked” or “processed” or “discharged” or “decalcified” or “detoxified” and so on. Anger is a linguistic label for a particular subcategory of the genius of biology. In fact, so is resentment.

Jesus is credited with teaching that “if you forgive the sin of another, their sin is forgiven. If you retain their sins (focus shame or condemnation on it, do not forgive it), their sin is retained.” Do not be angry at some past anger and then vainly think that the new anger toward the old anger is gratitude or peace or nurturing.

Condemning condemnation is a hypocritical sinning of condemning, at least if done sincerely with fear and terror. There is no shame in sin (or condemning or fear or terror), but there is grace in the forgiving of sin, in the recognizing of condemning as just one possible way of relating to something or labeling it as “what should not be,” which is sinful.

However, a parent or supervisor can present a taboo or boundary and enforce it, like “do not eat the fruit from this tree of binary dualistic fundamentalism in which there is an obsession about what is inherently evil and what is inherently good. I forbid that insanity of mental ill will. You can eat from any other tree of linguistic models, but beware of eating from the tree of the knowledge of shame and arrogance, the tree of idolatrous worship of words and idealisms and fanatical fundamentalisms.” That is a warning, not from terror, but for disciplining or discipling or rearing or training- perhaps even if by terrorizing with myths of Santa Claus and so on. “If you live your life from linguistic models of what is inherently evil and what is inherently good, you will blind yourself to the fundamental genius of biology, you will claim to be in hell rather than in heaven, you will claim the spirit of divisiveness and sin and condemnation and guilt rather than the spirit of holiness and grace and genius and wisdom, you will expel yourself from the perception of the genius of biology, but of course if you did that, that could only be an expression of the genius of your own biology, of your own genius which is the same genius as the genius of the so-called Divine Authority of the Heavenly Father.”

Jesus:

“‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’” (John 20:21–23).

There is a very slightly different wording in the English translation called the King James Bible:

bible.cc/john/20-23.htm
“If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”